On Page SEO With Yoast Page Editor

It’s an amazingly powerful plugin that has become the Swiss army knife for perfecting on-page SEO. In this post we are going to focus on how the plugins page analysis can help us with:

Title Tags

Header tags

URL optimization

Content length

Image optimization

Keyword density

Meta description optimization

Joost De Valk, the founder of the plugin, is continually refining the Yoast SEO plugin. If you are reading this 2 years from the date I published this book it wouldn’t surprise me if the screen capture images look out of date. However, as I explained above, on- page SEO doesn’t change that much so the functionality of the plugin remains largely the same.

Title Tags If you were to insert your own title tag using HTML for the page above it would read <title> 7 steps to creating the perfect Udemy course </title> If possible when using title tags include your main keyword in your title. If that main keyword will diminish the quality of the title, forget about it, but if you can use it and make the title sound natural, then go for it.

Also the nearer it is to the start of the sentence the better.

Header Tags You want to let the search engine know as soon as possible what your page is about. That’s why your url, title tag and header tag are very important on-page SEO factors. You only get one title tag, but you can use unlimited header tags. These help segment your post into different headings. This allows us to tell the search engine what each heading is about, and allows big blocks of text to be broken down. To use header tags, simply insert tags like so: <h1> this is an h1 tag </h1>. WordPress will allow you to automatically insert the header tags H1 through H5. When using headings, we achieve two things. We help ourselves rank for secondary keywords not included in our title tag, and we make the page more user friendly for the visitor to digest the content. NOTE: not all traffic lights have to be green in order to achieve an overall green score. As Joost De Valk himself says “You’ll drive yourself crazy trying to get all lights green”

URL optimization. A useful feature of WordPress is it allows you to write custom urls. The Page Title is used as ‘Click bait’ and the permalink url is used to target the keyword you want to focus on for this page.

The Slug corresponds with the bespoke url. In this case udemy-courses is what I am telling the search engine the page is about.

SEO Title

The SEO title instructs how the page information is displayed in the SERPS. In this example below, the SERP will display page title — url — sitename. The % denote spaces; sep= separator.

Yoast SEO Post/Page Editor

Content length The Yoast editor will give you a green light for adding content over 300+ words.Some content will still rank if you have only written150 words depending on how much Domain Authority you have, and / or superior on-page SEO to your competitors. If I am writing for a competitive niche, like SEO, the longer the word count the better.

Image optimization I believe Google values unique images more than often used wiki creative-commons images and will reward a website that uses unique images. Image optimisation starts with the file name. Make sure the file name relates to your keyword. When you upload your image into your WordPress Media Library there is an Alt Tag to fill in. Put your main keyword for the first image on your page. TIP: Use multiple images to target secondary and other long tail keywords. Google keyword planner (GKP) will show you which keywords are associated with your main keyword. Add a caption as well with the same keyword and more description about what the picture shows.

Keyword density

A popular tactic in the early days of SEO was keyword stuffing. When search engines were in their infancy they used to rank content more highly the more times it found the keyword on the page. This is a long outdated SEO tactic and should be avoided as it will get your page penalised. You do however, want to use your keyword and variations of the keyword through-out your content. The best advice I can give is just to write naturally. The Yoast page editor will alert you to insert more of your focus keyword if needed.

Meta description optimization

This is quite simple really. Place your keyword as near to the start of the meta description as possible. Goggle likes this. It’s also a good practice to implement with your Title, URL and Header tags. I’m repeating this as it’s very important. In the example post above, I wrote “Udemy Courses: 7 steps to creating an amazing Udemy course that can earn you your first $10,000 of passive income. Start today! ‘Udemy Courses’ pleases the search engine by describing the page and the next part of the description is simply there to entice the reader to click.